It looks as if there aren't any e17 themes in portage yet, correct?
So if I want to re-theme my new e17 install I've got to download and install local to my account, or perhaps tuck them somewhere in /usr/local.

I tried e17 from svn/overlayfor a while a year or so back, but the snapshots were never well maintained and it broke frequently, so I went back to icewm.

Since e17 has now been released, I recently installed it again, and am so far happy with it. Now I'd like to start making it my own, and the starting point for that is probably with themes. So at this point I'm essentially an e-noob, hence this question._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

I went to e17-stuff, downloaded several themes, and placed them in ~/.e/e/themes. When I bring up the theme switcher a series of dialogs pops up telling me that each is not a valid e17 theme. I know there is an old edje format and a new, and that the binary to convert old to new is no longer distributed. But I would have hoped that at e17-stuff I'd be getting new format themes, right off the bat.

Any idea what's up, or how I begin to diagnose this?

EDIT....

Never mind. All of those highly-rated themes (except one) were old. I remembered seeing "Gentoo-Purple" announced here, saw that and downloaded it. It installs OK. Then I noticed that Clearlook is also a new theme. So much for "e17-stuff" being e17 stuff._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

I tried e17 it a year ago or so but it appeared much too raw that time, thus I switched to Compiz+Cairo-dock. Not without issues - there is some broken stuff out there, too. Last years the Compiz development ceased and lately was announced to be stopped completely. So no hope it would ever improve... and I decided to give e17 another try. Now I have 0.17.0 installed just fine but subsequent customization appears to be really challenging due to lack of actual documentation. There is next to none, really, or obviously obsolete ones. So I'm here to ask questions. Please help me to jump in.

My first impressions are mixed, however. It looks even better than before while has some drawbacks comparing to Compiz. 2D performance (gtkperf) is about 35% better, while glxgears shows OpenGL works at least 10% slower - which eventually was a surprise for me. Also, the gears freeze for a moment every second or so. E17 is positioned as a fast and lightweight - but top shows 8% CPU in average since boot - it's more than I expected.

I tried to play with all the tuning knobs I could find with no success so far. When I tried to set up different wallpapers on different workplaces - they are redrawn very slowly (about 2-3 seconds for redraw a wallpaper - it ain't a usable feature as such) It looks as if software rendering is used while I believe the OpenGL backend must be on.

So my first question is - is it normal or something is wrong with my configuration? I use AMD E-450 based laptop - I think it ought to be capable to draw all this properly (at its speed, of course).

2. Do I understand correctly that 3D desktop is currently unavailable? I'm also interested in 3D shelf - I saw some on the e17-stuff screenshots but couldn't find out how to set it up for myself.

3. Are there consistent gtk2/E17 good-looking themes available? Are there ebuilds somewhere? I can install e17 theme from a downloaded file without a risk to compromise my system but don't feel like installing a program or a gtk theme without a ebuild. I browsed through e17-stuff.org but this is obviously wrong place to get a GTK+ theme...

4. It seems that a lot of ebuilds are missing yet... a WiFi gadget asks for Econnman which is seemingly unavailable. The same with new entrance, dev-python/python-elementary and dev-python/python-e_dbus and many other... Are there any secret ebuild sources I'm not aware of? How do people install native e17 apps without the risk of polluting the system with files and libraries portage isn't aware of?

5 How can I replace the poor e17 file manager with my favorite SpaceFM? Coldn't find any options...

6. Cairo-dock has a very useful feature to hide when overlapped with a window. Maybe there is an alternative shelf with more features in e17?

7. It seems that some documented earlier gadgets/modules are missing in the release. I couldn't find CPU load, mail notification, and some more... Did I search in a wrong place?

About E17 themes:
We make an effort to recompile all themes, because with the E17 stable release, they don't work correctly. I've recompiled about 16 old themes, I created 5 new (with several versions) and I have many more in my hard disk to fix.
If you go to the E17-stuff site, all themes in the 4 first pages, are working fine with E17 stable. You can download any of them and install it via Settings --> Settings Panel --> Theme --> Import --> Apply.

Question: When you go to Settings Panel -> Apps -> Personal Application Launchers, can you add a new one? If I try to add a new one nothing happens when I click OK or apply. Or is there another way to create new custom menu entries ?

Question: When you go to Settings Panel -> Apps -> Personal Application Launchers, can you add a new one? If I try to add a new one nothing happens when I click OK or apply. Or is there another way to create new custom menu entries ?

It works here. Though there is a bug in that the General tab's entries are not editable. It looks like the bug was introduced sometime just before release because it was working earlier.

You can check whether the file gets created or not. You can check the URL field which contains the full path to the desktop file that gets created._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

I tried to play with all the tuning knobs I could find with no success so far.

Just leave those knobs alone. I think the defaults are pretty good already.

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When I tried to set up different wallpapers on different workplaces - they are redrawn very slowly (about 2-3 seconds for redraw a wallpaper - it ain't a usable feature as such) It looks as if software rendering is used while I believe the OpenGL backend must be on.

First try without the composite module. The desktop should be very fast. Then try the composite module. You will need to provide more information about your configuration - your desktop size, your graphics card, your graphics drivers and the amount of memory in your graphics card. What I can tell you is that the composite module is plenty fast (barely even noticable) even with software rendering on a 720p desktop (and from what I heard, even on a 1080p desktop). But software rendering consumes more cpu, obviously. The opengl rendering is very fast, but you need enough graphics memory (I would suggest 512M+) when you have many windows open, and good graphics drivers. Binary nvidia drivers are known to perform well, intel drivers are ok, but ATI drivers (closed or open) perform the worst. There are fewer workarounds around ATI driver bugs.

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So my first question is - is it normal or something is wrong with my configuration? I use AMD E-450 based laptop - I think it ought to be capable to draw all this properly (at its speed, of course).

I would suspect your graphics drivers.

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2. Do I understand correctly that 3D desktop is currently unavailable? I'm also interested in 3D shelf - I saw some on the e17-stuff screenshots but couldn't find out how to set it up for myself.

There is no "3D shelf", but there is a module called engage which looks like the OSX dock. That module is currently not working (crashes e) with the release tarball, but is reportedly working with svn. I haven't checked out EFL-1.7.5, so the bug might already be fixed in that.

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3. Are there consistent gtk2/E17 good-looking themes available? Are there ebuilds somewhere? I can install e17 theme from a downloaded file without a risk to compromise my system but don't feel like installing a program or a gtk theme without a ebuild. I browsed through e17-stuff.org but this is obviously wrong place to get a GTK+ theme...

There are none. Maybe a half finished one in svn which looks like the detourious theme (it is in svn).

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4. It seems that a lot of ebuilds are missing yet... a WiFi gadget asks for Econnman which is seemingly unavailable. The same with new entrance, dev-python/python-elementary and dev-python/python-e_dbus and many other... Are there any secret ebuild sources I'm not aware of? How do people install native e17 apps without the risk of polluting the system with files and libraries portage isn't aware of?

Native e17 apps are not in good shape. The devs seem more involved in EFL than in e17 apps. Don't use entrance. It has been a wreck for years. Instead, you can use slim. There were some very good e17 apps earlier, but the long development period has seen most of them become stale. We can only hope that new apps will come up to replace the old ones, or the old ones will get updated.

I haven't tried any of the python-* stuff. So, I can't give any feedback on them.

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5 How can I replace the poor e17 file manager with my favorite SpaceFM? Coldn't find any options...

You can't replace that. e17 contains wm with the filemanager. It comes tightly integrated. In fact, any of the lists that you see in a theme selection dialog, or picture dialog, etc, are just an instance of the file manager.

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6. Cairo-dock has a very useful feature to hide when overlapped with a window. Maybe there is an alternative shelf with more features in e17?

Engage does that. But it is at least not working well with EFL-1.7.4. I haven't yet tried it with 1.7.5.

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7. It seems that some documented earlier gadgets/modules are missing in the release. I couldn't find CPU load, mail notification, and some more... Did I search in a wrong place?

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Many of those are in extra modules in svn. They are unsupported by the core e17 devs. You can install them from the enlightenment overlay._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

EDIT: I would like to mention that e17 runs now quite fast and nice and opengl enabled by firststart default settings. My poor IntelHD card seems to handle the graphics quite well.

A bit offtopic - may I ask what version of intel graphics card is that? Is it the HD4000? Can you let me know if the performance is fast even when you have several (say 10) "heavy" windows open. By heavy I mean programs like gimp, open/libreoffice, firefox, chrome, thunderbird, digikam, basket, okular, etc. which take quite a bit of memory.

I see that composite is not that fast on a 128M graphics RAM nvidia graphics card after I have several of such memory hungry applications open. With composite, the graphics memory quickly hits 112M after opening 3-4 such applications and then the system starts to lag. I actually see lags in redrawing after scrolling, scrolling performance itself becomes bad, desk change in E has lag, etc. On the other hand, on a 1G graphics RAM nvidia graphics card, I can have many such windows open and I never see any lag. I use the nvidia binary drivers on both the systems and both the systems have 4G of system memory. In comparison, on a non-composite desktop only about 50-60M of graphics memory is used when I have 3-4 such applications open._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

I tried to play with all the tuning knobs I could find with no success so far.

Just leave those knobs alone. I think the defaults are pretty good already.

Yes, I figured it out already by myself

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When I tried to set up different wallpapers on different workplaces - they are redrawn very slowly (about 2-3 seconds for redraw a wallpaper - it ain't a usable feature as such) It looks as if software rendering is used while I believe the OpenGL backend must be on.

First try without the composite module. The desktop should be very fast. Then try the composite module.

Tried both modes. As for wallpapers, it took about a second or so to redraw a background (white stripe went upside down to change image) - no matter what mode is chosen - couldn't notice any difference. As for 3D speed, without compositing it works 10-15% faster on default glxgears window size - just at the same frame rate as Compiz with compositing, while on full-screen glxgears e17 without a composite outperforms composited Compiz about 2.5 times. So switching compositing off does improve performance but not significantly. Considering bigger CPU utilization I feel that maybe it still uses software rendering somehow. Or there may be some incompatibility with the driver.

I eventually compare Compiz vs. e17 on the same hardware/drivers configuration. I expected e17 to outperform Compiz. It didn't - so I supposed maybe wrong settings are to blame. I use 3D desktop with cube on Compiz with compositing and frame rate is somewhat acceptable - about 75-80FPS (vblank zeroed, of course) dropping to about 45-50 while rotating the cube. BTW, I switched e17 FPS indicator on and see something strange - it ranges from 0.6 to 250+ while VSync is checked in preferences - so it shouldn't ever exceed 60FPS, right?

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2. Do I understand correctly that 3D desktop is currently unavailable? I'm also interested in 3D shelf - I saw some on the e17-stuff screenshots but couldn't find out how to set it up for myself.

There is no "3D shelf", but there is a module called engage which looks like the OSX dock. That module is currently not working (crashes e) with the release tarball, but is reportedly working with svn. I haven't checked out EFL-1.7.5, so the bug might already be fixed in that.

Okay, I should probably wait until Engage is up-to-date...

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3. Are there consistent gtk2/E17 good-looking themes available? Are there ebuilds somewhere? I can install e17 theme from a downloaded file without a risk to compromise my system but don't feel like installing a program or a gtk theme without a ebuild. I browsed through e17-stuff.org but this is obviously wrong place to get a GTK+ theme...

There are none. Maybe a half finished one in svn which looks like the detourious theme (it is in svn).

I don't feel like to install stuff bypassing portage - it's potentially problematic if things go wrong or you just want to roll back. So no ebuilds yet... okay.

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4. It seems that a lot of ebuilds are missing yet... a WiFi gadget asks for Econnman which is seemingly unavailable. The same with new entrance, dev-python/python-elementary and dev-python/python-e_dbus and many other... Are there any secret ebuild sources I'm not aware of? How do people install native e17 apps without the risk of polluting the system with files and libraries portage isn't aware of?

Native e17 apps are not in good shape. The devs seem more involved in EFL than in e17 apps. Don't use entrance. It has been a wreck for years. Instead, you can use slim. There were some very good e17 apps earlier, but the long development period has seen most of them become stale. We can only hope that new apps will come up to replace the old ones, or the old ones will get updated.

Sorry to read this. I'm using lxdm now, so I'll go on with it. I tried elna a year ago but couldn't make it work and was hoping it improves...

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5 How can I replace the poor e17 file manager with my favorite SpaceFM? Coldn't find any options...

You can't replace that. e17 contains wm with the filemanager. It comes tightly integrated. In fact, any of the lists that you see in a theme selection dialog, or picture dialog, etc, are just an instance of the file manager.

BUMP! Why Windows+IE came upon my mind? But if I try to open a folder on my desktop I see only background - no files are shown in native FM. Obviously something wrong with it...

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Engage does that. But it is at least not working well with EFL-1.7.4. I haven't yet tried it with 1.7.5.

Please let us know about the results.

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Many of those are in extra modules in svn. They are unsupported by the core e17 devs. You can install them from the enlightenment overlay.

A few observations/questions... I've been using e17 since a few days after hitting the portage tree.

1 - It took a while to get themes working, mainly to discover that themes at e17-stuff weren't necessarily e17 themes.

2 - So far the efm has only shown me blank windows when I open it against anything.

3 - Every now and then e17 seems to pause - stalling the entire desktop. The mouse pointer moves, but nothing else happens. I'll have to double check that, seeing if the cpu or clock widgets update. It's also not clear when that's happening - things just stop updating, and if you're not expecting something to update, you won't notice. I've noticed mainly when walking through the e17 settings dialogs.

For other reasons I've had compositing disabled in X, but am thinking of enabling it, and building the e17 compositing module. I don't know if I'm running OpenGL or not.

Has anyone else seen these pauses, or know what to do about them. I had thought that moving to compositing or OpenGL might fix things, but then I see here that both appear to make things slower.

I'm running on integrated Radeon HD4000 with 128MB side-RAM. Not a barn-burner I know, but it has been satisfactory for everything else I've been doing._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

@kanyck: Compiz does quite a lot of workarounds for buggy graphics drivers (doing software rendering instead of hardware rendering for certain things). e17 doesn't do that. Look up the enlightenment-devel/users mailing list for rants from raster against ATI drivers!

@depontius: haven't seen any of these problems. Not sure how to help you there. You should probably email the mailing lists._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

@ppurka
I'm far from questioning your experience but my impression is the opposite: that e17 does software rendering where Compiz uses hardware acceleration or even just a buffer switching... How else can I explain that it is sometimes slower 10% to 10 times while eating more CPU? But anyway, thanks for you answers. At least I got a clearer vision of the things, this is valuable to me.

I also wonder if e17 devs talk to radeon and mesa guys? From my experience they're quite communicative and open.

@depontius

2. Absolutely the same thing. It shows nice background, that's it.

3. I have short freezes, too. Also I can see glxgears got stuck for a moment roughly once a second if composite is on.

Hate to say this but I'm afraid the Radeon owners probably have to wait another year - e17 is really nice but still practically unusable... I didn't expect the things are this bad with e17 and radeon... After playing with it a few days I can not see it currently may be any better than what I have now - but I can see significant drawbacks. I'd have to give up many nice things I currently have, spend huge amount of time (including time of those whom I'll be asking for help) forcing things to work, bring another full set of libraries in my system while I'll still be using GTK applications for everything, use two file managers instead of one, etc. That's a pity, really, I was expecting much more from the release... Sorry for such a depressive post...

Hate to say this but I'm afraid the Radeon owners probably have to wait another year - e17 is really nice but still practically unusable... I didn't expect the things are this bad with e17 and radeon... After playing with it a few days I can not see it currently may be any better than what I have now - but I can see significant drawbacks. I'd have to give up many nice things I currently have, spend huge amount of time (including time of those whom I'll be asking for help) forcing things to work, bring another full set of libraries in my system while I'll still be using GTK applications for everything, use two file managers instead of one, etc. That's a pity, really, I was expecting much more from the release... Sorry for such a depressive post...

This probably doesn't bode well for nouveau either, I take it? From a performance/stability standpoint, I generally think of nvidia binaries being the best, followed by ATI binaries, followed by Intel OSS, followed by Radeon OSS, followed by nouveau. (Though perhaps from a stability standpoint I might have to put the ATI binaries at the bottom of that list, but that's based on hearsay, not experience. I've never used the ATI binaries or the Intel OSS - I've used all of the others.)_________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

I've ATI hardware so can't say anything about Intel and Nvidia... I compared ATI blobs with open-source. The latter is much more usable, stable and less problematic in any sense. I've been sitting on ~amd64 drivers for more than a year without any major issues. And it's becoming better and better with every release. The blob is the real pain but it is twice (or more) as fast if you play games (I don't, however). The 2D desktop performance contest is won by open-source, with compositing the open-source is comparable as well. So my ultimate choice is open-source.

I've ATI hardware so can't say anything about Intel and Nvidia... I compared ATI blobs with open-source. The latter is much more usable, stable and less problematic in any sense. I've been sitting on ~amd64 drivers for more than a year without any major issues. And it's becoming better and better with every release. The blob is the real pain but it is twice (or more) as fast if you play games (I don't, however). The 2D desktop performance contest is won by open-source, with compositing the open-source is comparable as well. So my ultimate choice is open-source.

What ATI hardware do you have? I have an embedded HD4200, so I know my performance is nothing to write home about. Still it has done everything I've needed it to, pretty well.

Side note... I just started fiddling with it yesterday and today, and it appears that my X has compositing turned on, after all. My understanding is that the "comp" flag merely turns on the configuration tool for compositing management, but doesn't have much to say about compositing itself. I don't know if it's on or off by default, if the tool hasn't been built.

Anyway, tonight I tweaked the flag and rebuilt e17 with "comp" turned on in E17_MODULES.

When I go into settings, I can't find it. A little searching and it's supposed to be in the "Look" section, but it's not.

As a side check, I've left glxgears running while I've been doing all of this fiddling. It runs perfectly smoothly, even when the desktop itself has it's few-second hangs.

If I can figure out how, I'd like to turn compositing off, and see how that affects things._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

@depontius: composite should be there in your case. Can you post the output of

Code:

emerge -pv enlightenment:0.17
enlightenment_remote -module-list

@kanyck: you can compare software compositing in e itself. Go to look -> composite -> rendering, and set it to software. If you don't get hangs/stalls then it is your graphics drivers._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

If I can figure out how, I'd like to turn compositing off, and see how that affects things.

You may just go in the Modules menu, find compositing module and press "Unload" button.

I currently use AMD E-450-based laptop with HD-6320 intergrated GPU.

I know nothing about "comp" USE flag. Generally xcomposite is used to enable X compositing (I keep it defined globally).
Maybe you mean enlightenment_modules_comp? It enables compilation of compositing module, but there's no need to recompile the whole thing to disable the module - you may just unload it.

About E17 themes:
We make an effort to recompile all themes, because with the E17 stable release, they don't work correctly. I've recompiled about 16 old themes, I created 5 new (with several versions) and I have many more in my hard disk to fix.
If you go to the E17-stuff site, all themes in the 4 first pages, are working fine with E17 stable. You can download any of them and install it via Settings --> Settings Panel --> Theme --> Import --> Apply.

I don't know why people are having issues with themes but I was able to easily download 6 themes and install them following these simple instructions. All working and looking great.

Incidentally, I found the dialog to load the composite module and did so. As I loaded it, for a few moments things got really laggy and even glxgears (my background screen-checker through all of this) froze up. After that things have seemed fine. Even through this the only lags I've noticed have been when navigating the e preferences dialogs. Those are about as laggy as they were before._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth